WMVP (WCFL) 1000, Chicago

It's a new year here at Tower Site of the Week, and a new
set of travel pictures to start us off. In August 2007, your
editor and Mrs. Editor spent a few days traveling from her native
Fort Wayne to Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison and then back to Fort
Wayne via Rockford, Illinois, and along the way we had a chance
to see some very significant broadcast sites.

In particular, we had a very productive afternoon on the west
side of Chicago, visiting three historic and important 50 kW
AM sites that we're honored to be able to share with you over
the next few weeks.

In our last
installment, we dived deep into the well of Chicago broadcasting
history, not just into the relatively recent waters of WMAQ,
but all the way back to the long-gone era of KYW. This week,
we wrap up our whirlwind afternoon in Chicago's western suburbs
by visiting a somewhat newer site, but one that still has plenty
of history to recommend it: the Downers Grove site of Chicago's
AM 1000. You can call it by its current calls, WMVP, if you'd
like. To us, this will always be WCFL.

Fortunately for us, and for anyone who loves radio history,
all the recent renovations at this site - and there have been
many, as we'll see - didn't disturb the big stainless-steel letters
on the front of the Art Deco building on 39th Street, and we
trust that you (and the station's current owners, Disney) will
forgive us if we still think of this as the "WCFL site"
as we head inside and check out all the history that lives within.

WCFL didn't just call itself "The Voice of Labor"
- in its early years, it really was. Under the ownership
of the Chicago Federation of Labor and the management of founder
Ed Nockels, WCFL debuted in 1926 from Chicago's Navy Pier as
a radio station devoted to the causes and concerns of organized
labor. By 1928, WCFL had outgrown the Navy Pier transmitter site
and had purchased this 100-acre site in Downers Grove, where
it finally broke ground in 1932 for what would end up being a
50,000 watt transmitter site.

WCFL took a while to get to 50,000-watt status, gradually
adding towers as it raised power. The first of what would be
three self-supporting towers on this site went up in 1935, followed
by another in 1945 and a third in 1947. It was around that time
that the RCA BTA-50F transmitter took its place along the west
wall of the big transmitter room. This was the "classic"
WCFL configuration that pumped out one of America's most influential
top-40 formats two decades later: three towers on a roughly east-west
axis, two 499' tall and the center tower 446' tall, with two
of the towers sending a mildly directional signal toward downtown
Chicago by day, and all three coming into play at night to create
a cardioid pattern aimed east, protecting co-channel KOMO in
Seattle. (It's hard not to get chills just thinking about all
the Biondi and Lujack and Weber and all the other great voices
that went out through this site back in the days of "Super
CFL.")

That facility, augmented by a Continental 317C that came along
in the seventies, outlived WCFL's glory years. The Chicago Federation
of Labor sold the station in 1978, and after several years of
ownership by Mutual and then by Amway, WCFL became a religious
station in the eighties. That's when the studios and offices
moved out here to Downers Grove, into a two-story brick building,
complete with a cross motif on the front, that went up next to
the transmitter building. (It's now used for storage, I'm told.)
Later on, WCFL was sold again, becoming WLUP(AM) for a few years,
ending up with the WMVP calls as a sports station, and ultimately
becoming ESPN Radio's Chicago outlet, with studios
located in ABC's Chicago headquarters at 190 State Street.

By then, the old towers were showing their age, and in the
spring of 2006 this site began to undergo its biggest change
in half a century. WMVP was then a sister station to WLS (890),
and the FCC issued it special temporary authority to operate
as a diplex on WLS' tower in south suburban Tinley Park at reduced
power while workers began erecting three new guyed towers right
in the midst of the old directional array. For several months,
WMVP shifted to the WLS site during the day while workers were
on the Downers Grove property, then moved its signal back to
Downers Grove at night when the tower work was over each day.

When
the work was done, the array included one 489' tower and two
410' towers, with a brand-new ground system, new transmission
lines and a rebuilt phasor. There's even an FM antenna on one
of the towers, intended to be an auxiliary site for WZZN (94.7
Chicago), though now that WZZN and WLS have been sold to Citadel,
separating them from WMVP, it's not clear that the aux facility
for the FM will ever be built out here.

Even without the old towers out back, the history is palpable
in this old transmitter building. We'll pretend for a moment
that we didn't come in through the back door and instead imagine
that we came in the front way, through the glassed-in lobby.
At the front of the building, tiled walls and big windows set
off a row of offices (and what looks like it might once have
been a makeshift studio) on one side, and on the other side stainless-steel
railings line a stairwell that goes downstairs.

Back in the day, the view from this spot would have been truly
dramatic: the ceiling rises to the big double-height transmitter
room, with the massive RCA transmitter filling the entire wall
to the left, the phasor and the Continental 317C straight ahead,
and the control desk for the RCA in the middle. (And check out
that lovely Deco band of stainless steel that lines the wall
above the transmitters and phasor, too!)

Today, this view also includes a few other more recent additions:
the current main transmitter, a Harris DX50, sits with its back
to the front door and another rack of STL and processing gear
behind it.

There's another auxiliary transmitter - I believe it's a Continental
316 in an unusual configuration - sitting between the DX50 and
the 317C. As for the big RCA, it is, sadly, only a facade these
days. Long since out of use, it was gutted a few years ago as
part of a cleanup project here, and there's now nothing but storage
behind that beautiful wall of cabinets. It still looks magnificent,
though - and the whole site is still impeccably maintained, and
now ready for another half-century of broadcast service.

And from here, we've got a shiny new transmitter site awaiting
us 90 miles to the north in Milwaukee, though the blue skies
behind these WMVP pictures don't even hint of the summer storm
that's on the way, making that a three-hour rush-hour slog up
the Tri-State Tollway to get there...

Thanks to WMVP chief engineer John Hurni for the
tour!

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